WhatIs

/zen/

vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to problems of life in general.

"How'd you figure out the buffer allocation problem?"

"Oh, I zenned it."

Contrast grok, which connotes a time-extended version of zenning a system.

Compare hack mode.

See also guru.

/zap'd/

adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is spicy-hot. For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, vanilla wonton soup is hot but not zapped.

See also oriental food, laser chicken.

See zap, senses 1 and 2.

/zap/

1. n. Spiciness.
2. vt. To make food spicy.

3. vt. To make someone suffer by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.)

   See zapped.

4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision.

   "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again."

/yü-shyäŋ hōl fish/

n. obs. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not parsed) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. 

/yō-yō mōd/

n. The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits.

Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby.

/yau̇/

[from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix]

interj. A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis.

"Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!"

Compare gurfle.

/Y-M-M-V/

[from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers]

cav. 

1. A ritual warning often found in UNIX freeware distributions. Translates roughly as "Hey, I tried to write this portably, but who *knows* what'll happen on your system?"
    

2. A qualifier more generally attached to advice.

   "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary."

/Y-A-N-E-T-U-T/

[UNIX]

cav. The canonical comment describing something magic or too complicated to bother explaining properly. From an infamous comment in the context-switching code of the V6 UNIX kernel.

You know you've been hacking too long when...: The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These include the following:

/yet ə-nə-t͟hər/

adj. [From UNIX's yacc(1), Yet Another Compiler-Compiler, a LALR parser generator]

1. Of your own work: A humorous often used in titles to acknowledge that the topic is not original, though the content is. As in Yet Another AI Group or Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm.

2. Of others' work: Describes something of which there are far too many.

See also YA-, YABA, YAUN.

/ye-lō bu̇k/

[proposed]

n. The print version of The New Hacker's Dictionary, forthcoming from MIT Press, 1991. Includes all the material in the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most importantly, the book version is nicely typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry.